Many different instruments have been devised for obtaining diagnostic samples from various cavities of the body. In the routine pap smear check for cancer, the most commonly used instrument has an elongaged stem with a shaped flat blade at one end. The instrument is inserted to place the blade at the cervical opening and is then rotated to scrape off cellular material, which is deposited on a microscope slide for examination.
This technique is effective only when there is desquamation of the pertinent cellular material at the cervical opening. If no suspect cells are discovered there is normally no further testing. However, there may be significant samples in the endocervix and on the endometrium which are not reached by the blade type instrument. A diagnosis based on the samples obtained by the conventional blade type instrument may therefore be incomplete and it may be possible that a malignancy or other dangerous condition exists, yet remains undetected. Since the consequences of an undetected malignancy can be very serious particularly with the possibility of cancer, it is very desirable to obtain a more complete sample that is normally obtained in the standard pap smear test.